Artists Under Hitler : Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany by Jonathan Petropoulos (review)

Since the 1990s, our understanding of Nazi cultural bureaucracies, policies, and productions has become increasingly refined. However, the belief that modernism was wholly antithetical to German fascism remains stubbornly entrenched. Backward, boring and just plain bad, Nazi art supposedly conquered Weimar culture. According to yet another dominant narrative, modern artists who refused to emigrate all stayed true to their art until 1945, when they resurfaced as survivors of Nazi persecution and proof that the “real” artists had remained above the political fray, and ready to assist in the recovery of German culture.

With Artists Under Hitler, Jonathan Petropoulos offers a much-needed corrective to these claims. Focusing on ten artists who worked in media as diverse as painting, music, film, literature, drama, and architecture, he demonstrates convincingly that many German modernists sought to accommodate both themselves and their art to the Nazi regime. Petropoulos combines biography with cultural, social, and political history to recapture the conflicting motives that drove artists to collaborate with the Nazis. His intense research in numerous archives reveals modernism not only persisted during the Third Reich but also became part of the regime’s aesthetic in surprising and complex ways.

Petropoulos begins by recounting the political struggle over modernism as supporters and opponents fought to shape the new cultural landscape. But rather than tell the tale of modernism’s gradual exclusion, Petropoulos instead draws attention to its survival. He illuminates the “pockets of tolerance” (55) modern artists found in galleries, museums, journals and even the Reich Chamber of Culture. Although 1937 remains a signal year in the evolution of art in the Third Reich, it did not mark the wholesale demise of modernism.

The central part of the book is divided into two sections, “The Pursuit of Accommodation” and “Accommodation Realized.” Both demonstrate the lengths to which artists went to find acceptance. The real strength of Petropoulos’s work here is his assessment of artists’ motives and actions. The five who sought but ultimately failed to find accommodation — Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Barlach, and Emil Nolde — shared certain assumptions and personality traits Petropoulos argues shaped their efforts. All had weathered hostility from the public and critics during the Weimar Republic; they had little reason not to expect they would eventually survive in the new cultural climate. As the author shows, these men were driven by enormous ego, careerism, and the desire to profit from the range of official posts, commissions, and other benefits Hitler’s investment in the arts offered. They thus submitted works to Nazi competitions, defended their reputations as racially German, and generally worked to find a place within the Nazi cultural apparatus. That they failed was due more to their refusal to adapt their artistic styles sufficiently than any principled rejection of National Socialism.

Petropoulos argues that artists who did find fame and fortune in the Third Reich shared the same personality traits and professional concerns. But unlike their less successful counterparts, they were willing to adapt modernist techniques, approaches, and aesthetic vocabularies to produce works not just accepted by the Third Reich but emblematic of the regime. Richard Strauss, Gustaf Gründigens, Leni Riefenstahl, Arno Breker, and Albert Speer each had pre-1933 connections to modernism that they never wholly abandoned. Petropoulos demonstrates just how they incorporated modernist elements in their scores, performances, and art.

Petropoulos’s treatment of all five of these successful artists is detailed and convincing; his argument that we consider Riefenstahl and Speer as artists who adapted modernism for the Third Reich is especially fine. But I remain troubled by Petropoulos’s use of the term “accommodation.” On the one hand, it seems clear that he adopts this term to add complexity to the motives and decisions of the artists, and to avoid the condemnation inherent in “collaboration.” Yet he also appears to use the two words interchangeably. This is admittedly a minor point, yet fuller discussion of his choice...